LInkage: 7 December

I want to listen to all the accents! I love accents!

This is awesome. But the book is much, much better. (Much. I might also say, real life is much, much better than the FB.)

You can be assured I'll be checking this for a good forecast just as soon as I can! (10 days before Christmas, it says! 10 Days Before is coming right up!)

The school principal from my junior-high days (who also, ironically, turned out to be my husband's first boss...in a totally different region of the country) used to talk about the pitfalls of an instant culture. That was almost 20 years ago. It's still true now, and Intellectuelle has posted an excellent essay on that very same subject.

I like to read 6YearMed. She recently posted about the discomfort of not quite 'fitting in' in your town. Not that my town is snooty (hah! far from it), but every now and then the 'Southern gentility' fits just a teensy bit too tightly on this Coloradan.

How Do You Roll?

I'm having dinner tonight with my friend G who's growing into a deeper friendship with me. (That's a story for another time.) Anyway, we were talking on Sunday and revealed our secret inner insecurities.

I wish I were more task-oriented like G is. A doer. You know The Doers: the ones who maintain deliciously beautiful homes at all times. Mundane Housekeeping Tasks seems to come naturally to them, and they never sit still and just think, or sit still and just read, because the To Do list looms over their heads.

She wishes she were more analytic-oriented like I am. I'm a thinker, and I know us. We read the dictionary to find new words we don't know. (Saturday evening I spent an hour with a fellow thinker. We each read our own dictionary*, sharing new and exciting words aloud to each other...) We sit and think and analyze for hours. We sometimes do kooky things just to see what would happen. (In the college dining hall, I once ate my entire meal of chili-mac off my tray, not off a plate. Just to see what would happen.)

Here are some implications:

• Why do the both of us assume there's something wrong with the way we were created?
• Why does each of us assume we are lazy because we don't operate the way the other does? I feel the pain of my innate laziness because I don't Do as much as she does; I daresay she feels the same sort of insecurity when compared to my Constant Thinking and Analyzing.
• Why can't I accept her help in making me a better Doer, a better Housekeeper? More accurately, why am I hesitant to accept her help?
• Which type of acumen is assumed to be more usable? (You can get tutoring anywhere...I'm tutoring a girl in my Linguistics class on the finer points of grammar, and I could tutor my friend G in doctrine and theology if she wanted...but honoring your innate talent for Do-ing and Housekeeping by tutoring people like me who just aren't Doers? That's a bold idea.) To rephrase and clarify my question: who is considered to be more important: white-collar workers or blue-collar workers? And why is that?

Sigh. Here I am ruminating over the Thinker/Doer dichotomy (and using words like dichotomy, too) when I should be (1) planning my weekend meals and (2) compiling my grocery list so I can (3) get home and (4) cook food and (5) clean my house.

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*Yes, we own two dictionaries. When we married, we purged multiple copies of the same books, especially duplicate college textbooks, but we decided not to fight over whose dictionary to keep. Other issues are more important...like which of the double sinks do you want? and how will we squeeze our toothpaste tube now that we share one? and the ever-popular how much does it annoy you when I correct your grammar? Oh, the delights of being married to a Thinker.

Thankful Thursday V

• A nice house to live in
• Good-quality furniture to put in our nice house
• Sunshine (the weather is warming up down here!)
• The pear trees are just about ready to bud--maybe they'll bud for Palm Sunday
• A washer and dryer in my house--no more trips to the laundromat!
• The word of God, like a mirror to my soul
• Forgiveness, when the mirror of God's word reveals sin that I've so carefully hidden from othgers and tended for my own benefit
• Language. (It's cool)
• New friends at college and at my church
• Old friends
• My family--especially my parents who were the first ones to teach me the gospel
• Hope for tomorrow--literally: Friday, abstractly: all my tomorrows, theologically: my Eternal Tomorrow in heavenA visit from my SiL this weekend
• Sleep and rest

There's more, people, but I have got to get to my choring.

If I Had a Scanner...

...or a digital camera, for that matter...I would digitize the image of my linguistics midterm and post it here. This will have to suffice:

-0

100/100

[Bows.] "I'm so proud!"

Thankful Thursday IV

I missed last week's! There was something about having a long to-do list and I simply let it slip. I'm sorry. Anyway, here goes:

~The new header makes me happy. It reminds me of last summer's festivities. My friend cj took the photo.
~My husband remains sweet and kind and faithful, my truest friend.
~Regardless of insidious and sneaky attacks on our faith, or clumsy and fumbling rants disguised as fables and fairy tales, the Word of the Lord remains the only sure and certain testimony.
~Learning truths about the Lord Jesus and his ways from 2 Peter...who knew you could get pages and pages and pages of journaling from the first two verses, the salutation??
~Regardless of yesterday's flops and failures, the Lord's mercy is new every day.
~The sun is shining brightly today (I love sunshine!)
~We have had rain, rain, rain lately; we need more because of our drought.
~A pleasant conversation last night with a new friend. This friendship has lots of promise to become a long-lasting friendship.
~A good conversation yesterday afternoon with an old friend.
~Old friends whose friendships don't fade or break even when we've been through some serious stuff.
~My family. I miss them.
~My parents' faithfulness to the Lord, to each other, and to me and my sister. What a blessing to have godly parents!
~Spring Break.
~Language. You know how complex a language is, and how amazing it is that we just learn it? Babies just hear and listen and hear, and they pick it up. *Poof!*
~That the awkward and question-filled season of my life called 'courtship' is over. What a strain, right? Whew.
~It's worth it, though.

Never Read that Sentence Before, or, The Principle of Discreteness

I just had a test in my class, and I hope it went well. I studied, which is more than I can say for my college days...so that at least is a step up.

Here's a thought. One of the concepts I reviewed for the test was the principle of discreteness. Here it is in a nutshell:

• In any language, there are a finite number of words and prefixes/suffixes/infixes.
• In any language, there are a finite number of grammatical rules shaping the way those words are put together.
• However, there is theoretically an infinite number of sentences that can be composed. (Try this sometime: read a book and highlight every sentence you think you might have read somewhere else.)

And I think the title of my most recent post counts as "a sentence I've never read before."

Monday Update 2 (Written on Tuesday)

• Hours of class attended: only 1
• Cups of coffee: 2 (+1 decaf)
• Conversations with friends (old and new): 2
• Conversations via email with SIL A: 1 (extended over the whole day, though)
• Conversations with a publishing house confirming the cancelling of my Free Trial Account (and that my credit card will not be charged): 1 (it was very civil)
• Conversations with a passport official (he must have been in New York or somewhere because it was not civil at all): 1
• Applications collated, stuffed into envelopes, and mailed (with well-written cover letters!) : 7
• Reference request forms stuffed into envelopes (with corresponding cover letters and stamped, addressed envelopes): 3
• Number of times I annoyed the Covenant Mailroom people while copying, collating, buying stamps, etc.: 4 or 5
• Meals eaten yesterday: 2
• Time we arrived home after a long day: 9:00pm.
• Time we got into bed and turned the lights off: 10:30pm.

Linguistics and its effect on my Friday

First, let me tell you about the events of the day:
*Ian took me to Covenant for my class. (He's got a Winter Long-Weekend-Break right now, so he didn't have to be dropped off at his school first.)
*I went to class. There, Hellen asked me to tell her more about English grammar. (She's from Kenya and speaks 4 languages besides English--Swahili is her native tongue.)
*Hellen and I had a grammar session and set up another one for next Friday.
*We all (Ian, Hellen, and I) went to chapel.
*I stopped by my British professor-friend's office.
*We went home, and went on from there to do errands and other grownup responsible things.

Now, let me elaborate on a couple neat things for today:

I'm really, really enjoying my class! It's been really interesting, and fun, and challenging, too. Last semester's Developmental Psychology was challenging in terms of (1) the amount of material I needed to learn and (2) the volume of assignments we had to turn in. (The professor called it 'unrelenting'--one project/test/assignment every week! Whew!) This semester is challenging in terms of the intricacy of the subject matter. It's pushing me and making me work hard intellectually, and I'm liking that. I've missed that sort of challenge.

I have a classmate (H) this semester who was also in Dev Psych with me last semester. H is also married, and so we have that in common. H is African and because English is not her mother tongue, she finds other challenges in this class. (The professor may talk for 5+ minutes about how other languages organize their sentences, and if H can't remember as easily as the rest of us the difference between an adjective and an adverb, it challenges her.) She and I spent some time together talking about English grammar, and we have another session next Friday morning after class to fine-tune her adjective/adverb understanding. Ian was at the table with me and H, and once she left, Ian told me that my ability to understand my material and to explain it to H seemed intuitive, and that I ought to more seriously consider the 'dream of ESL.' Yay.

Ian and I spent the entire day together, and we haven't done that for a long time. It was one of those days where a list of activities would bore you, but which was invigorating and necessary for both of us. You know, adventures and activities make compelling stories that are fun to read, but not as much fun to experience. This day was the opposite: wonderful and restful to experience, but not at all compelling or interesting as a story.

...It's a Meme

The rules of this game:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.

Turn to page 123.

Find the first three sentences.

Post the next three sentences.

Tag 5 people.

(Got this meme from here.) I'll play!

The instructions to each exercise are somewhat different in each case, so read them carefully before proceeding. However, each exercise requires that you follow the step-by-step procedure for doing a phonemic analysis outlined in the previous file. The exercises are designed to introduce you to problems involving minimal pairs, complementary distribution, and free variation.

Georgios Tsedernalis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong, editors. Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics. 9th ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.

And I'll follow Adventures in Mercy's lead and spiff up the tagging: YOU if you are reading this, plus Mike, Heather, cj, and Bob. Also I will tag Erin, jkrue, and Carrie.

(Do me a favor and leave a comment with a link telling me that you took the tag. Thus this game will also serve as a de-lurker. Theoretically.)

That's What Makes it So Fun!

If there were an inherent, nonarbitrary connection between forms and meanings, with the meaning being determined by the form, then...cross-linguistic differences should not occur. There would be one universally correct form for each meaning, and every language would have no alternative but to connect that form and that meaning. You can see that if you were to follow this idea to its logical completion, there would now be only one universal and unified language, with no controversy over what a spoken word meant or how to express a certain meaning. It would all be automatic.

Georgios Tsedernalis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong, editors. Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics. 9th ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.